The Irishman thought for a moment. “Boatswains Bay, maybe. Somethin’ near the point of North Sound.”
“Is it a secluded area?”
“Some of it is. The turtle farm is out in that direction. An’ the little settlement I told ya about—Hell.”
“A couple of other things in the room caught my attention. Behind one of his bureaus someone had drilled a hole. I doubt if anyone else noticed it. Scrape marks on the floor tipped me off. One of the drawer legs was sitting right on top of it.”
“I wondered why you were movin’ the furniture.”
“When Sir Conan had guests, I think his little Tommy was peeking at them.”
“I’ve somethin’ of the voyeur in me too, Yank. What does it prove?”
“Probably nothing. I’m just trying to put information together. You pile up enough random information and before you know it a picture emerges. The picture I’m getting of Tommy is one of a very intelligent kid who also has a very active interest in sex—like most people over the age of twelve. But put the two together. Sir Conan is a womanizer. You told me that yourself, plus I got some firsthand proof which I’ll tell you about later. His mother is a beautiful drunkard who has the look of a nymphomaniac in her eyes. Tommy is more than smart enough to understand what’s going on. But kids are funny. What they fantasize about for themselves seems repulsive when they see their parents in some sexual role.”
“What are ye tellin’ me, Dusky?”
“I’m telling you there’s a chance the kid just got mad and staged his own kidnapping.”
“Aye. But it doesn’t account for the murder of me poor Cynthia.”
“That could have been a completely separate incident.”
“Sure, it coulda been. But that doesn’t explain one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s only one silver Jag on the island.”
“Who owns it?”
“When I met me Cynthia she was drivin’ a rental car because hers had been stolen. She never mentioned what make. The police still haven’t found it. It was a four-year-old XKE. And painted silver.”
7
Even after O’Davis told me about the thirty-foot workboat he used to carry his diving parties out to the reef, I didn’t expect the old wooden clunker that was moored off Gun Bay Village on Cayman’s east end.
“Pretty little thing—fer a powerboat—don’t ya think, Yank?
“Yeah—pretty like a bulldog.”
“And jest what is that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t they sell any paint on this island?”
“Paint! Now would ya have me ruin the natural beauty of ’er?”
We stood at the edge of East Sound, looking out toward sea. The water was so clear that the boat seemed to hover over the coral bottom in midair. What paint there was was white and streaked with rust. The cabin had been built far forward, leaving no bow deck. Behind us, kids played in the sand yards where chickens scratched. Windfall mangos rotted beside colorful ply-board houses, and women on the streets carried parasols to protect them from the March sun.
The Irishman jammed his fists on his hips and
humphed
loudly. “I’d be havin’ a prettier vessel ta squire ya around in if I hadn’t a lost me fine sailin’ ship savin’ yer snitty little life back in Mariel Harbor, Cuba.”
“God, you’ve got a memory like an elephant.”
“In that case, you’ll not be bad-mouthin’ me little boat again.”
“Deal.”
Big black letters on the stern of the boat proclaimed its name:
Rogue.
O’Davis paddled us out in a leaking tender that threatened to sink beneath the weight of us both. Once aboard, he anchored the dinghy off.
“It’ll take us all day to get to the other end of the island in this thing—not that I don’t like going slow,” I added quickly.
“Will it now?” he said slyly. “We’ll see.” Humming his strange Irish tune, O’Davis went below to the cabin and returned with something heavy wrapped in oilcloth. He laid the package on the deck and unrolled it.
“Fast or slow,” he said, smiling, “we’ll be well armed.”
There were two old Thompson submachine guns—the kind you see in the old gangster movies, but without the circular drum magazines. These had the standard box clips.
“Always carry them for sharks,” he explained. “Both of ’em work good as new. Thirty-round clips for each with about four hundred rounds of .45 caliber stashed below.”
“I take it you have a lot of sharks around here.”
“Never had ta shoot at one.” He grinned.
I was wrong about O’Davis’ old dive boat being slow. And I was ready to admit it the moment he fired up the engines. The whole superstructure trembled with the loud
burple
of mufflers.
“It’s not diesel?”
He shook his head. “Twin GMC 442s. Awful hard on fuel, Yank, but this ol’ boat will fairly scream across open water.”
And scream the boat did. I unclipped the mooring line, feeling comfortable once again after changing out of that damnable suit. O’Davis maneuvered us skillfully through the reef, pointed the bow west and north, then drove both throttles home. The force of it jerked my head back and I had to grab hold of the bulkhead to keep from being thrown overboard.
“Slow, ye said!” the Irishman cackled. “An’ do ya call this goin’ slow?”
“Not too bad—for an older boat, that is.”
O’Davis grimaced and put all his weight on the throttles. There were long glassy swells rolling out of the north. Gulls and a stray cormorant flapped madly out of our path while coral heads through the clear water went by in a blur. The old boat rattled like a skeleton, but the engines ran perfectly. Every wave brought teeth crashing against teeth, jarring the kidneys. We were doing at least fifty.
And fifty in an old thirty-foot boat is fast. Very damn fast.
“Okay, okay,” I yelled. “I’m convinced. You have a quick boat. Now slow down before you kill us both.”
Laughing happily at his victory, the Irishman backed down a quarter on the throttles. “Fastest boat on the island,” he said proudly.
“Why is it I keep thinking this hull wasn’t made for twin four-four-twos?”
“Ah, she does shake an’ shimmy a bit. But she’s like an old wife—jest complains ta let ya know she’s around. The hull’s seen a decade or two come an’ go, but she’s made of native mahogany and manchineel—sound as a dollar.”
We ran just off the reef line past Wreck of Ten Sails, where, according to O’Davis, a fleet of Jamaican merchantmen bound for England had misunderstood a warning light and, one after another, grounded on the reef on a dark night in 1788. A couple of other rusted hulks, oil barges, sat partially submerged off Roger Wreck Point.
“This wee island has seen the world’s sailors and pirates come an’ go in the last four hundred years,” the Irishman mused. “An’ some o’ them that came never made it away again. No one will ever know how many vessels rest broken below that bloody reef line. Divers find new ones every year.”
We skirted the island and headed west toward North Sound. The landmass was lush and green, edged with white beach across the expanse of turquoise water. Twice a helicopter angled across the island in front of us—part of the search for the son of Sir Conan James.
“On an island as small as this, ye’d think it would be very hard to hide anything—let alone a human bein’,” O’Davis said. “But as ya kin see, Yank, there’s a lot of untouched swamp and jungle on Grand Cayman. That’s why I wanted ta take ya fer this little ride.”
The Irishman was right. Traveling by car, I had gotten the impression that you were never far from a road or a house. But once past the eastern point of the island and the sparse settlements of Gun Bay Village and Spotter Point, there were nothing but desolate expanses of beach backdropped by palm trees leaning in windward strands and the deeper green of tropical forest.
The only other boats to be seen were some kind of barge—a dark smudge on the rolling horizon—and a large sailboat, outward bound.
A few miles north, we began to see more houses. O’Davis rummaged through the little dunnage box and handed me a chart of Grand Cayman. It was weathered, soft as tissue, and there were rum lines with compass headings showing wrecks and reefs penciled in.
“We’re coming up on Old Man Bay now?”
“Aye. An’ that’s Grape Tree Point jest ahead. There’s only one road connectin’ the south side of the island with this—the north side. If I was wantin’ ta hide, I’d try to disappear west off that road.”
“The chart says it’s pretty high ground.”
“Locals call it a mountain. O′ course, it’s not really a mountain; more a series of bluffs than anything. The only real mountains are below us. All submerged. The island herself is a part of the Cayman Ridge, a range of submarine mountains which extend from the Sierra Maestra range of Cuba westward to the Misteriosa Bank toward British Honduras.”
“Very interesting, professor.”
The Irishman grinned. “Part of me speech to the tourist divers.”
“And a good speech it is—but I want to know more about the inland bluffs. A person really could hide there for a time without being found?”
“I’m afraid I’m not well schooled on the mountain. Few islanders are, Yank. All sounds very romantic, explorin’ bluffs, an’ all, but when it comes right down to it, the sun’s hot and the rocks are sharp and it’s about as easy as walkin’ through a thousand acres of brambles.”
“Then that seems the place we ought to search.”
“An’ what do ya think the helicopter is for, mate?”
“They can see everything from the air?”
He shook his head. “No—not everything, certainly. There be caves up there. Nobody knows how many fer sure. Back in the seventeen hundreds Edward Teach used one of the caves as a hideout. Somethin’ of a tourist attraction now. Some say it was where Teach shot his first mate, Israel Hinds.”
“I remember the story.
Treasure Island.
And Teach is known as . . . ”
“Aye. Blackbeard. The pirate Neal Walker came to Grand Cayman a few years later. History says he robbed the galleon
Genoese
of sixteen thousand pieces of eight. Legend says he buried it somewhere on the island.”
“And that’s another part of your speech to the tourists?”
“They do warm to the idea of buried treasure,” he said, smiling.
At Rum Point, Grand Cayman’s even shoreline suddenly gave way to the ragged, massive indent of North Sound. The Irishman banked southward along the tropical wilderness, leaving the tourist traps like Cayman Kai behind.
I was beginning to find it all very discouraging. For an island only twenty miles long and eight miles wide, there was one hell of a lot of open shoreline and an equal amount of inland forest. And we didn’t have much time—only thirty-six more hours, if the kidnappers stuck to their word. It seemed like an impossible task. We needed more to go on. It was a time for fast work, and following hunches if need be. But I didn’t even have enough information to form a hunch.
“What were you and Lady James talkin’ about when I came up in the car?” O’Davis asked suddenly.
“She invited me to dinner—but I already told you that.”
“It’s jest that you mentioned you knew Sir Conan to be a womanizer. It’s a popular topic of conversation with her. But she usually waits until she knows ya a bit longer—an hour or so.”
“No. She didn’t tell me. It came from some accidental original research I was doing.”
He tilted his head in question. So I told him about my meeting with Diacona Ebanks and the scene in her apartment.
“Could have been rather awkward, Yank, had he seen you—bein’ invited to his lawn party and all.”
“I got the impression that he would have acted as if it had never happened.”
“Aye, ya might be right. Most Englishmen got a skin like an elephant. Robots.”
“You think Sir Conan might have been involved with Cynthia Rothchild?”
“It crossed me mind. I mentioned it to her two days before she died. She got quite huffy. She said absolutely not. Hard to imagine Lady James letting her stay had they been makin’ the creature with two backs.”
At Governors Creek we passed a fleet of native-built commercial boats where, for four hundred years, the turtle ships have been kept at anchor. Black men, sweating in the sun, worked in the rigging and wove nets. Ratty houses in the background were painted bright blue and conch pink. Some of them still had roofs of thatch. An emaciated dog stumbled through the March heat, looking for shade.
O’Davis nodded toward a hatchet-shaped point of land beyond.
“That’s Head of Barkers. Ya wondered about the landward horizon ya saw through the telescope.”
“That’s it?”
“Aye. That an’ the little curve of peninsula before ya get to West Bay.”
“Can you get in a little closer?”
“We’ll slip in through the reef at the point an’ run right up the shore.”